ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurol.
Sec. Neuro-Oncology and Neurosurgical Oncology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2025.1585921
This article is part of the Research TopicImproving neurosurgical precision: leveraging technology for enhanced visualization and navigation of complex neuroanatomyView all 7 articles
The Effect of Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumors on the Volumes of Intracranial Structures
Provisionally accepted
- 1Erciyes University, Kayseri, Türkiye
- 2Cappadocia University, Ürgüp, Nevşehir, Türkiye
- 3Samsun University, Samsun, Samsun, Türkiye
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Objective: Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumors (PitNETs) can cause symptoms via mass effect or hormonal imbalances. This study investigated whether PitNETs induce volumetric changes in intracranial structures and assessed the diagnostic potential of these changes.Material and Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 90 PitNET patients and 86 healthy controls. MRI data, acquired on a 1.5 Tesla scanner, were processed using the automated Vol2Brain system to calculate relative brain volumes.Results: PitNET patients exhibited significantly lower relative volumes across numerous brain structures compared to controls. This included reduced intracranial, cerebral, and cortical gray matter (GM), as well as temporal lobe, vermis, limbic lobe, hippocampus, and inferior lateral ventricle (ILV) volumes. Gyrus-level analysis also revealed significantly smaller volumes in key regions like the posterior orbital gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, and entorhinal area in PitNET patients. ROC analysis demonstrated good to very good diagnostic performance for ILV volume (AUC=0.863; p=0.002) and subcortical GM volume (AUC=0.725; p=0.049) in differentiating groups. Reduced volumes were also noted in basal ganglia structures.Conclusions: Our findings indicate significant volumetric reductions in various brain regions in PitNET patients, potentially explaining observed emotional and cognitive symptoms. The diagnostic utility of ILV and subcortical GM volumes is promising, suggesting their value as diagnostic adjuncts. These objective volumetric assessments may assist in surgical planning and patient stratification, though further prospective research is warranted to establish direct links with clinical outcomes.
Keywords: Intracranial volume, neuroendocrine surgery, Neuronavigation, Pituitary neuroendocrine tumors, Vol2brain
Received: 01 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gökoğlu, YİĞİT, Yolaçan, Nisari, Unur and Selçuklu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Abdulkerim Gökoğlu, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Türkiye
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.